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- Is Donald Trump vs. Jimmy Kimmel just another episode of The Trump Show, and we’ll move on, any day now?
- Could be! We move on from everything.
- But it might last longer. And regardless, we should all take it seriously: The president threatening a comedian is a basic free speech violation.
Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air. Donald Trump is threatening to sue Disney for putting him there.
Where does this go next?
The least interesting answer may also be the most likely: Our attention goes somewhere else. That’s what we do.
The federal government vs. Kimmel is already a week old, which is way longer than most stories last now. And both Kimmel and Trump are professional communicators who know their audiences want new things.
On the other hand: This one could last longer than most. It pits a broadcast-network talk show host against a president who cares a lot — way more than most people — about what happens on broadcast-network talk shows.
And while we’re used to Trump making big threats that go nowhere, Trump 2.0 does follow through on some of them. That’s because he’s surrounded himself with people eager to make his whims real.
And once things start, they’re hard to stop, even if Trump stops talking about them.
Take his lawsuit against Gannett and Des Moines Register pollster Ann Selzer. When’s the last time you heard Trump talk about Selzer? Exactly. But last fall — after his election but before he returned to the White House — Trump sued Selzer and Gannett, alleging they interfered with the 2024 race by publishing a poll that got it wrong. The argument is laughable because inaccurate election projections aren’t illegal. But the suit is still out there, and Selzer and Gannett still have to fight it.
So we’ll see. We don’t know. But while we’re here, let’s be clear: Trump vs. Kimmel isn’t just another Trump feud. It’s the President of the United States crossing a very bright line, trying to use his power to silence speech he doesn’t like.
And what worries me is how quickly some people — not just partisans, but normals — are framing this as tit for tat. The left censored and canceled speech they didn’t like, so now it’s just the right’s turn. Both sides are to blame. What a shame.
If that’s you, I’d beg you to do a tiny bit of reflection. Even if you think that, say, Tucker Carlson getting the boot from Fox in 2023 was “cancel culture” (a crazy idea, but one people insist is legitimate), you can’t equate Rupert Murdoch firing one of his stars with the President of the United States threatening to sic the government on a comedian. Not remotely the same.
There’s a slightly more sophisticated version of this argument floating around, often in tech circles: That under Joe Biden, the federal government leaned on platforms to police speech during COVID and the 2020 election, and that Trump/Kimmel is just the mirror image. Ben Thompson makes a version of this case in his latest column.
And I do think it’s worth interrogating how the platforms behaved in those moments. The pandemic and the post-2020 election chaos were messy, unprecedented situations, with shifting facts and unclear rules of engagement.
But comparing that to a sitting president threatening to use the power of the federal government to punish a TV host who makes fun of him is not taking either issue seriously. And treating them as equivalent makes it much easier for real abuse of power to skate by unchecked.
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